Golden West Nuggets

Posted on November 3, 2022 by admin

This is the kind of detail that keeps the built environment interesting. A visible part of an alarm system of some earlier vintage, operable or not.

To be found in Placerville, California. You can also take a look at a small tower of some vintage in that town.

Placerville’s old bell tower. For use in the pre-electronic communication days, with a ring meaning something’s going on, come quick.

Wish I’d been hungry in Placerville, but no.

Some miles away, a Coloma plaque. I’m a fairly regular reader of plaques.

Another. I could post nothing but plaques, but that would be more granular than I want to be.

It’s a good-looking part of California anyway.

With recreational opportunities.

Mark Twain on Lake Tahoe (from Roughing It): “At last Lake Tahoe burst upon us, a noble sheet of blue water lifted some 6,000 feet above the level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft a full 3,000 feet higher still.

“As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains, brilliantly photographed upon its surface, I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords.”

Enjoyable vistas for sure. It was good to see other people there.

I had breakfast my first morning in Reno at a restaurant for old people — except that’s me now, isn’t it? But on a weekday mid-morning, I was one of the younger patrons. Decent food, though a touch expensive (a contagion from California, no doubt, plus the inflation du jour).

After I finished, I went out to leave, but noticed a sign I had to see, not far away. I took a closer look.

Not in the market, but someone must be. If that isn’t local color, I don’t know what is.

When serendipity is with you on the road, that kind of sighting leads to others. That’s what happened that morning in Reno. This was nearby the wedding chapel.

“Bee Dance” by Andrea Greenlees (2019), according to its sign, which also said it was created at Burning Man that year.

On the next block — all this was on West Fourth Street in Reno — was a closed off place called Glow Plaza, an outdoor event space that only opened this year. Well, open for concerts on the weekends. It wasn’t open for me to look around, though there was some construction going on at an adjacent site (probably new apartments), so maybe that restriction was just temporary.

Anyway, I got a look from the sidewalk. New-looking sculptures.

Including vintage Reno neon, or maybe close-replica homages.

Speaking of apartments, this property in downtown Reno has the look of a 2010s adaptive reuse. I checked, and it is. It used to be a motel. The loss of an SRO property? Maybe, but I didn’t know there was much of that left.

Now it’s an “upscale micro-unit living facility,” to borrow a phrase from Northern Nevada Business Weekly. I checked again, and its rents range from $1,100 to $1,700 (the low end of the range is for about 250 square feet).

Could have done an entire posting of name plates on vintage cars at the National Automobile Museum. The familiar and the less familiar.

That last one’s an attention-getter. You can find it on a Krit Motor Car Co. auto, made years before jackbooted lowlifes shanghaied the symbol.

The Battle Born Memorial in Carson City, dedicated to fallen soldiers from Nevada.

At first I thought, iron? True, iron is at the heart of modern war. But as soon as I was inside, and looked up, I realized how fitting the material is. A remarkable memorial.

Especially when you gaze up at it.

The names of the fallen are inscribed there.

Eight hundred and ninety-five names, I understand. Punch Architecture did the design, which was completed in 2018.

Later I looked up Battle Born. I didn’t know that was a nickname for Nevada. Everyone’s heard Silver State, but not Battle Born State. I puzzled on that a while, but eventually realized that when Nevada entered the union (1864; Lincoln needed another two Senators), it joined the fight, as a state, to keep that union together.

A much smaller metal-work, underfoot in Carson City. Good to know I’ve been on the Kit Carson Trail.

Underfoot in Reno.

On the road to Virginia City.

The drive out from Virginia City to I-580 is along Nevada 341, and it’s a winding drop of a drive through arid landforms. This snip from Google maps illustrates the winding-est part of the road, called Geiger Grade Road at that point. The entire drop is from more than 6,100 feet above sea level at Virginia City to Reno’s 4,500 feet.

Light traffic on a sunny weekday afternoon. A fine drive if you’re paying attention. Almost car commercial driving.

This instead of a real map.

No, California. Don’t do this. It’s false economy. I don’t know how, I just know that it is.

I figured out my way around without a gizmo map. I even found a spot a few hundred yards from a parking lot, and a little off a nearby trail, where I could sit in the sun for a few minutes, and listen to only faint sounds. Almost as quiet as Joshua Tree or Big Bend NPs.

The Hotel Charlotte in Groveland, California. Now a hundred years old, it’s the kind of place that gives you a brass key, and lets you know there’s a fee for replacing it. Basic and comfortable, though the most expensive place I stayed on this trip; you’re really paying for near access to Yosemite NP.

Main Street in Groveland (California 120), just after dawn.

A few more images. Such as in Sacramento.

I had to look up lumpia: spring rolls found in the Philippines and Indonesia. And northern California, it seems. Too bad I wasn’t hungry. Also, it was closed. Not long after, I saw a Balinese restaurant in Old Sacramento. Still wasn’t hungry. Damn.

I was driving to the last place I was going to stay in Sacramento on the late afternoon of October 7, and I got a little turned around, wandering some neighborhood streets before the inevitable moment when I pulled over to consult Google Maps.

I chanced on this place.

What a garden it is.

An extravaganza of roses.

Go in the garden and ask the rose its meaning.

Milwaukee Hipster Doughnuts &c.

Posted on September 29, 2022 by admin

Time for an autumnal break. Back to posting around October 16, when the tree colors will be bold and the winds (probably) brisk, at least around here. Expect photos.

Out last stop in Milwaukee on Sunday afternoon, as a light rain fell, was Chubby’s Donuts, spotted by chance and visited on a whim.

The place has a mascot atop. Hard to tell just how chubby he is.

The doughnuts, which are really round dough-rings each about the size of an onion ring, come in bags, and are dusted liberally with cinnamon and sugar. Pretty good, but I’m not running up to Milwaukee just for them.

On Monday evening, we went to west suburban Westmont to visit my old friend Kevin, and participate in a trivia contest at a local restaurant. That was a first for me, unless you count the contest at one of my former companies, at a company event ca. 1999, that netted me some movie tickets.

I don’t remember all the various categories now, but as usual, some were easier than others, and our team (Kevin, Jay and I) came in second, partly on the strength of us knowing all eight of the comic strips in the visual part of the contest. Everyone got a piece of paper with eight single panels illustrating each comic, but without any captions, and you had to name the strip for each.

They were The Far Side, Calvin & Hobbes, Nancy, Garfield, The Family Circus, Bloom County, The Adventures of Tintin and Beetle Bailey.

I thought they were easy. Maybe it’s a generational question: who among the younger set is going to know that many of them, much less all?

Then again, I remember a high school English teacher of mine expressing wonder that any adult — including a highly educated friend of his — would spend time reading the funnies, so perhaps he wouldn’t have done very well at naming them either, despite being of the generation who grew up with Terry and the Pirates (for example).

Another category was songs with the word “love” in their titles, which of course includes a lot of possibilities. Name the artist, given the song title. We didn’t do that well — flummoxed mostly on the newer songs — but God help me, I knew that the Captain & Tennille had a big hit with “Muskrat Love” (1976).

What I didn’t know, until I happened to hear about it on the radio a few years ago, was that the Captain & Tennille’s version of “Muskrat Love” was a cover, and that the band America had done an earlier one. It was written and first recorded by Willis Alan Ramsey, of all people. In any case, it’s one of those songs not that you’ll always remember, but which you’ll never forget.

Farmers’ Market Near an Abandoned Shoreline

Posted on September 20, 2022 by admin

Still warm and sunny here, though punctuated by thunderstorms. I don’t think I saw them forecast — one Sunday evening, another this evening. They rolled through quickly, and didn’t even interfere with evening dog-walking.

On Saturday, I noticed this plaque in Lincoln Park. I didn’t remember seeing it before.

It’s in a good location. The ridge is very much visible from that spot.

Clark Street is to the right, beyond the edge of my image. At that point it’s the western edge of the park, but mostly it’s a non-grid North Side street, one I knew pretty well in my city-dwelling days. It was near my first apartment, and sometimes I took the No. 22 Clark Street bus places (occasionally all the way from downtown, but the El was faster).

In Chicago, non-grid usually means the street follows an Indian trace, and so it is with Clark, at least north of Chicago Ave. Other one-time Indian traces coursing through the North Side include Lincoln, Elston and Milwaukee Aves. The South Side has them, too, such as Ogden and Archer Aves.

In the Loop, Clark is park of the grid, and has been there a long time. Wonder how many people realize that it’s named for George Rogers Clark, whose sizable monument is pretty far away from Chicago?

Not far from Clark on the western edge of Lincoln Park, I happened across Green City Market, a large farmer’s market, in progress. It’s held on Wednesdays and Saturdays during the warmer parts of the year. It was busy.

Lots of tents.

Some wonderful-looking produce.

I don’t begrudge the farmers their direct-to-consumer sales, but the emphasis on “organic” and “pasture raised” and — I saw this — “regenerative agriculture” — got to be a little much. At least I didn’t see anything advertised as “curated.” It can’t be as simple as “fresh produce,” can it?

But that didn’t bother me too much. I enjoyed the band.

The tip in their bucket was the only money I spent in the park that day.

A Summery September Saturday in Lincoln Park

Posted on September 19, 2022 by admin

I can’t let International Talk Like A Pirate Day pass without a mention, as I have for so many years. Somehow, that would be wrong. There’s a place in the world for silly days. So here’s a public domain image for the occasion.

“The Capture of the Pirate Blackbeard, 1718” by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1920). He’s an American artist I wasn’t familiar with until recently. He’s been mostly forgotten, his style considered outdated.

Summer in its mildest form lingers here in northern Illinois: bright days, little wind, puffy clouds, temps that let you forget whether the air is hot or cold. Good for going out for a long walk (Saturday) or staying at home and sleeping late and then lounging on the deck (Sunday) and reading and watching various bits of visual entertainment.

The Saturday walk was through Lincoln Park in Chicago, from the southern edge northward, along the boardwalk and into the zoo, and back again along the ridge that used to be the lakeshore. I also passed through a crowd at a farmers’ market.

Been a while since my last visit. That too was a late summer stroll.

This time, Yuriko was at her cake class making this —

— which is every bit as good as it looks.

Meanwhile, I took a bus east to Lincoln Park, crown jewel of the Chicago Park District and home to fields and paths and trees and shrubs.

But there’s no forgetting the surrounding city.

I didn’t seek out monuments this visit. The park is dotted with them, as much in the background as the tree canopy or bushy undergrowth for most people, who are missing messages in bottles from the past.

I did pause at Hans Christian Andersen, whose bronze dates from 1896. It gave the impression that he was enjoying the shade.

“The Hans Christian Andersen Monument Association [local Danes] commissioned John Gelert to produce the sculpture,” park district says. “A Danish immigrant, John Gelert (1852–1923) arrived in Chicago in 1887, receiving his first commission for the Haymarket Riot Monument two years later.

“Gelert portrayed the children’s author sitting with a book in hand and a swan at his feet, alluding to his world-famous story, ‘The Ugly Duckling.’ The artist explained that ‘he had the advantage of studying several good photographs of Andersen taken at various times in his life.’

“Gelert displayed the Hans Christian Andersen Monument along with his now-missing Beethoven Portrait Bust at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. (Installed in Lincoln Park in 1897, the Beethoven bust was stolen in 1970.)”

Elsewhere, in the shade of the Schiller statue, in fact, a small brass band did some tunes al fresco.

On the whole, the walk was good.

As I saw printed on the side of a truck parked on a street running through the park.

Budget Buster

Posted on September 14, 2022 by admin

I’ve been seeing items in various stores advertised as “inflation busters,” which is vacuous as most other ad-speak, and not very original. But it did seem to inspire this variation, found on a circular for a local pizza joint.

Made me smile. Budget buster, eh? What was the thought process that went into that choice of words, which ended up meaning the exact opposite of what was probably intended?

Unless, of course, they meant to say that the place is expensive, so it’s got to be good. Somehow, I doubt it. If you really can feed 20 people — let’s take the low-end estimate — then $8.25 each isn’t bad.

Bob Chinn’s Crab House

Posted on September 13, 2022 by admin

Sunday did not, it turned out, represent the top of a long steady slide into the miseries of winter. Still too early for that. Monday was cool, today warmer, and 80s are predicted for the coming days. Many of our meals are still being taken on the deck.

Except for the late lunch-early dinner (linner?) we had recently in honor of Yuriko’s birthday. We went to Bob Chinn’s Crab House in Wheeling and had delightful plates of fish, but no crab.

This is just one room of the enormous Chinn’s, which has 736 seats and claims to feed a million patrons a year. We arrived before it got too busy, which I hear is often.

Volume, for sure, but high-quality food as well, and a solicitous wait staff. That will keep you in business for 40 years.

I had the opakapaka, an Hawaiian snapper. Those are potatoes, not apples, on the side.

Yuriko had the macadamia sauteed basa, a fish native to Southeast Asia. We opted for a dessert that the menu called “Bob’s Slice of Heaven,” made from purple Okinawan sweet potatoes. Oh, yes.I learned while at the restaurant that old Bob Chinn died in April at 99. Born in 1923 in Duluth to Chinese immigrants, he’d been in the restaurant business since he was a teenager, founding Bob Chinn’s in 1982. A daughter and granddaughter run it now.

“The Crab House was modeled, according to various sources, either after fresh seafood restaurants in Hong Kong or Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami, which Chinn had long admired,” the Chicago Eater says.

“But unlike Hong Kong or Miami, Chicago had no access to fresh seafood. Chinn solved that problem by getting up early every morning and driving to O’Hare to pick up shipments that had been flown in from the coasts, some of which were still alive. (He invested in special tanks in the restaurant basement to hold the crabs and lobsters.)

“He kept costs low by buying in volume from wholesalers — he had a separate business in Honolulu to scout the fish markets — and by using only the cheapest dishes and silverware.”

Bob Chinn’s isn’t precisely cheap, but I did get the sense that we would have paid more for the same in other high-end fish houses. Good for you, Bob. RIP.

Dinner Salad & Garden Still Lifes

Posted on August 30, 2022 by admin

Last night for dinner, we had tilapia and salad — cucumbers and tomatoes from our back yard. Mostly Yuriko attends to the various garden plants in pots next to our deck, though I do a fair amount of watering, and put the pots back upright when the wind blows them down.

A most delicious salad, pictured here in our red plastic mixing bowl. Looked like this before we added a bit of oil-based dressing and I added croutons to my serving.

The yard produces somewhat more than we can eat. When that happens, as an old friend of mine put it, you’re gardening for virtue.

As long as I had my multitudinous image-maker handy, I thought I’d do a few still lifes as well.

So seldom do I write about art that I had to check: the plural is indeed still lifes, not still lives, which maybe could refer to a cave-dwelling hermits who lead still lives.

Gas Giant Thursday

Posted on August 25, 2022 by admin

Now that’s an image. It’s been getting some attention, and for good reason. Marvel of the age. Posted here.
The entire caption, for form’s sake, since I’m not going to further investigate the technical specs of the filters:

Webb NIRCam composite image of Jupiter from three filters – F360M (red), F212N (yellow-green), and F150W2 (cyan) – and alignment due to the planet’s rotation. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Judy Schmidt.

I saw a video clip about these Webb images today — produced by some local news outfit — and Jupiter was called “fifth rock from the sun.” Had a nit to pick with that, right away. Pretty big nit, actually, consider that Jupiter’s equatorial diameter is about 88,900 miles. The planet isn’t called a gas giant for nothing.

The following are couple of physical leftovers from the Michigan trip, acquired at grocery stores along the way. In both cases, my friends left the unused portion behind with us, and we’ve used them up in the weeks since. Such as the ground coffee. They said it was good, and Yuriko agrees.

Superior Coffee Roasting Co. is in Sault Ste. Marie, state of Michigan side.

The coffee bag got me thinking. Just how many ore carriers are their plying the Great Lakes these days? The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum didn’t mention that, or at least that I saw. But the answer isn’t hard to find in our Internet-linked times.

More than 100 freighters transport iron ore across the Great Lakes, a combination of U.S.- and Canadian-flagged, and international carriers, according to an article published by the Great Lakes Seaway Partnership in 2019.

Citing the Iron Mining Association of Minnesota, the article also notes “more than 80 percent of the nation’s iron is mined in Minnesota, and that ore accounts for nearly 60 percent of shipments leaving the Duluth port. Iron ore led the port’s exports in the last year [2018], with 21.5 million tons shipped — the most transported from Duluth-Superior in a single season since 1995.”

Next, strawberry-rhubarb jam. Gone, as you can see. Much of it put on my breakfast breads this month. Wonderful sweetness. From Keweenaw Kitchens of Baraga, Michigan, on L’Anse Bay on Lake Superior.

Good travel writing can be hard to find. I came across this text the other day, when looking for useful information about a particular small U.S. city, Z.

Are you ready to explore some of the most AMAZING things to do in Z?

All caps doesn’t inspire confidence, but let’s carry on.

The perfect blend of unrivaled nature and diverse culture, Z is one of [state name]’s most vibrant and eclectic towns.

Interesting choice of adjective to go with “nature”: unrivaled. I’ve never been to this city, but I’m sure its “nature” is interesting enough, maybe even beautiful. Much else surely rivals it, though.

As a buzzing college town, Z offers an abundance of events and activities as well as being the perfect melting pot of different states from across America.

The only bit of useful information in that sentence is the fact that Z is a college town; but I already knew that, and so do many other people.

Not only is Z a hive of activity and excitement, the town also offers some of the most spectacular nature to be found in [state name].

This unique town is one not to be missed and with so many things to do in Z, you will certainly want to stop by.

“I’m looking for the hive of activity and excitement,” you say to the clerk at the Information booth in Z’s airport. “Could you tell me where that is?”

Well, it’s easy to mock this paint-by-numbers intro, but I might go through the slide show anyway, despite the fact that I’d support this kind of bad writing in some small way by adding to its clicks. Why? You can learn even from bad sites. I don’t know the city that well, so I’m bound to notice someplace I might want to see.

Sure enough, I did. More than one place.

Out in Washington State

Posted on August 23, 2022 by admin

Two days after I returned from the UP and packed my friends off at O’Hare, I was back at that airport, dropping Yuriko and Ann off. They were headed for Washington state to visit Lilly, returning six days later.

They took in some Seattle sights.

Last year, I recommended that Lilly go up the Space Needle on her 24th birthday, because that’s what I did on my 24th birthday in 1985 (and she hadn’t been yet). She wasn’t able to do that — November’s probably not a great time for views anyway — but at least she did so when she was still 24.

Views of Puget Sound.

Plus sights east of the metro, such as Snoqualmie Falls.

And the curious town of Leavenworth, Wash., which is Bavarian themed. With street trolls, apparently.

Looks like they ate well, too.

The trip was everything they thought it should be, they told me. Good to hear.

Pop Up to Canada

Posted on August 16, 2022 by admin

When planning our recent trip, I suggested a visit to Sault Ste. Marie, mainly to see the locks that connect the higher-level Lake Superior with the lower-level Lake Huron (and Lake Michigan, for that matter). Engineering marvel and all that.

The idea of crossing from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, didn’t really register with me. Maybe because I’m blasé about visiting Canada, having done so a number of times.

Or maybe because I dreaded whatever rigmarole Covid-addled Canada would force upon us to cross the border. After all, it was only about a year earlier that I’d seen the near-empty Rainbow Bridge between Niagara Falls, New York and its counterpart in Ontario, bereft of its tourist traffic.

Someday, I knew I’d want to go to the Canadian Sault St. Marie, because it’s the jumping off point to take the Agawa Canyon Tour Train and see other sights northeast of Lake Superior, but all that would take more time than we wanted to spend on this trip.

My friends had other ideas about visiting Canada. Namely, they wanted to. Just a pop across the border on August 3 and spend the night in Ontario, returning to the UP the next day. Two of them had never been to Canada, a slightly flabbergasting notion, and the third had only visited Vancouver Island on a long-ago organized bus trip in high school. They were keen to go, if only for a brief sojourn.

I didn’t object, and we went across the international bridge that afternoon. The rigmarole turned out to be fairly modest, uploading our Covid vaccination cards and passport numbers and a few other details the day before at a web site called ArriveCan, which generated a QR code on our phones that I was sure the guard would want to see, along with our passports.

She did not. Just the passports, and she asked a few perfunctory questions to make sure we weren’t degenerates trying to sneak into Canada, and we went through.

Our visit to the Great White North was short, but sweet. We had dinner — the best of the trip, I thought — at Uncle Gino’s Cafe & Ristorante. I had the penne alforno. The food was delicious, not too expensive (helped by the relative strength of the U.S. dollar), and the waitress was a peach.

Sault Ste. Marie is a small industrial town, including steel and paper products, and more recently hydroelectric and wind power. We drove around town a bit, and soon took a riverside stroll.

Wind chimes inside funnels along the boardwalk, the likes of which I’d never seen. Makes a pleasant tune, though.

We made it as far as the historic Sault Ste. Marie Canal, which includes smaller locks than on the American side. Reminded me a bit of the Erie Canal.

The canal’s historic structures were closed for renovation, but nice to look at.

So were the clouds.

We spent the evening at our rented house, drinking wine, conversing and watching videos each of us selected in turn. I suggested a few Caro Emerald videos, and she was a big hit, as was Tammi Savoy, a delight I only discovered myself in January.

We left in the next morning and I forgot to suggest we visit the local Tim Horton’s. Damn. My friends missed an essential Canadian experience. They probably would have liked the coffee and I know they’d have liked the doughnuts. Guess they’ll have to visit the country again sometime.

As for me, I came to consider my visit to Sault Ste. Marie as a scouting expedition. One of these days, I need to come back to explore the region more thoroughly — take that Canadian train and see those U.S. locks.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Food & Beverage